Fledging director Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dali create this ultimate surrealist film, which is essentially a barrage of striking and irrational images designed to shock and provoke.

Confederate army reject Johnnie Gray (Keaton) sets out to single-handedly win the war and the heart of his beloved with the help of his cherished locomotive. Considered one of the most cleverly choreographed comedies ever recorded on celluloid.

A girl mysteriously disappears on a yachting trip. While her lover and her best friend search for her across Italy, they begin an affair. Antonioni’s penetrating study of the idle upper class offers stinging observations on spiritual isolation and the many meanings of love.

This non-linear autobiographical film of director Andrei Tarkovsky is considered by many Russian-speakers to be his best film and is his most personal meditation on time, history and the Russian countryside.

Federico Fellini satirizes his youth in this carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy in the Fascist period. His most personal film, the Academy Award-winning Amarcord is one of cinema’s enduring treasures.

The Sacrifice, director Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, begins in Bergmanesque fashion on a small, remote island, where friends and family gather for drama critic Alexander’s birthday celebration. The revelry is interrupted by a radio announcement: World War III has begun…

Following the collapse of his clan, unemployed samurai Hanshiro Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai) arrives at the manor of Lord Iyi, begging to commit ritual suicide on his property in Masaki Kobayashi’s scathing denouncement of feudal authority and hypocrisy.

Winner of the Best Director prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Wong Kar-Wai’s Happy Together is a stunning display of filmmaking style and a touching story of love on the brink of dissolution.

A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg) and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.

Slapstick prevails when Jacques Tati’s eccentric hero Monsieur Hulot is let loose in the ultramodern home of his brother-in-law, and in an antiseptic factory that manufactures plastic hose. Tati directs and stars in the second entry of the Hulot series, a delightful satire of mechanized living.

The final, deliriously surreal, provocative, and blasphemous collaboration between Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. In this classic experimental film, l’amour fou is thwarted by a politically, socially, and morally repressive society, and the only solution is to revolt!

A rare look at World War II from the Soviet side, Come and See is based on the real-life experiences of Ales Adamovich, who fought with Russian partisans in Belarus in 1943, when the Nazis systematically torched over 600 villages and slaughtered their inhabitants.

Expanding on the latter’s style, themes, and mood, Fallen Angels is set in the surreal milieu of urban, nighttime Hong Kong; This visually stylish and unabashedly effusive work is considered by some critics to be the quintessential Wong film.

A mixture of psychological thriller and road movie, The Return tells the story of two young brothers, Andrei (Vladimir Garin) and Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), who must cope with the sudden and unexplained return of their long absent father.

At a station between heaven and earth, guides help the newly dead search through their memories and find the defining moment of their lives. A warm, imaginative film about what matters in the world beyond, from acclaimed director Hirokazu Kore-eda (Nobody Knows).

The story of an elderly guide and Goldi hunter, who, at the turn of the century, agrees to shepherd a Russian explorer and a troop of soldiers through the most treacherous passages of the Far East. The guide is “one” with the land, and is thus able to save his party from perishing.

A surreal breakfast, lunch and dinner. Who knows what one eats? What can you expect from the person in front of you at the table?

Immanuel Rath, an old bachelor, is a professor at the town’s university. When he discovers that some of his pupils often go into a speakeasy, The Blue Angel, to visit a dancer, Lola Lola, he comes there to confront them.

Sandrine Bonnaire won the Best Actress César for her portrayal of the defiant young drifter Mona, found death in a ditch at the beginning of Vagabond; with its sparse, poetic imagery, Vagabond (Sans toit ni loi) is a stunner, and won Varda the top prize at the Venice Film Festival.